


Desolation

by lyryk (s_k)



Category: White Collar
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-17
Updated: 2011-03-17
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:35:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s_k/pseuds/lyryk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate must live with a difficult choice. Set post season 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desolation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tashlum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tashlum/gifts).



She dreams of rain, of rivers with grey stony banks. She hates this omniscient third-person point of view in dreams, hates being unable to locate herself in her own dream. The river flows with single-minded determination, struggling against its imprisoning banks at every step of the way. She can’t find herself in her own dream. It’s disorienting, dislocating.

She can’t find herself.

It’s not that she loves Neal, because she doesn’t. She’s no longer in love with him, at any rate. No, it’s the weight of his grief that pulls at her as though it’s a stone bound to her ankle when she’s drowning. It had been easy, so easy, to make him believe that she had perished in a fireball. She hadn’t had a choice: not if she wanted to free herself from his desperate search for her, from his constant attempts to reclaim something they’d lost long ago, maybe even before Copenhagen.

She dreams of a grieving woman, of a boy who inadvertently endangers his family, of needing to steal ten thousand dollars to feed crab and roast pig to ten people. After that particular dream, she gives up meat for months, the absurdity of dream-logic catching up with her in her waking hours, changing the taste of meat to the taste of blood.

She begins to refine her desolation as though it were a block of marble and she were a sculptor searching for the work of art inside it. She chips away at it day after day, giving in to it, searching for ways to repent. She laughs to herself at the analogy, for she was never an artist, not in the way that Neal was. _Is. No, was._ She must think of him in the past tense now, for the one way to rid herself of the weight of her guilt is the one path that she will not allow herself to choose. Freedom has come at a price, and she has already paid it. It’s not refundable.

She keeps dreaming, keeps chipping away, keeps refining. Maybe one day, she’ll discover that the weight is no longer tied to her ankle, that she can swim up to the surface and break through the sparkling water to feel sunlight on her face at long last.


End file.
